October 2013

This months monthly round-up features a great collection of Halloween themed design tutorial some truly remarkable Photoshop and illustrator tutorials to get your teeth sunk into. We have also featured within the round-up some web and design articles, which we recommend reading.

Responsive designs are more and more frequently used today. Many people started using mobile devices, like smartphones or tablets, to browse the internet, and thus, having a fully responsive website is a must! But what is a responsive design? Responsive designs have specific CSS media queries added, in order to make them fit on any specific screen size. This way, your website will look great and will have different stylings, depending from which device it is read.

Today, we selected 20 best responsive menu tutorials for you, to further enhance your web developing skills, and to create beautiful responsive websites. Also, these great responsive menu tutorials, come with free scripts you can use and download, at the end of each tutorial.

Which one of these 20 responsive menu tutorials do you think is the most comprehensive?

Carousel elements will give your website’s visitors the ability to easily access multiple content items. Carousels are scrolling lists of items, displayed horizontally and they have dynamic effects. You are able to scroll back and forth and see the list of items. Carousel elements or effects are also used in creating sliders. These are great for portfolios, where you need to showcase lots of images, but they can be used for other types of websites too.

Today, we looked for the best jQuery carousel plugins we found on the web. These carousel plugins are both free and premium, and will surely save you a lot of time in designing your website.

A short illustrator tutorial on how to create abstract spirals. This is a very popular technique, which I’m more than certain you may have seen before we have created several resources using this technique on creative nerds.

In this tutorial we will be revealing how to create spirals of your own. The final tutorial takes less than a minute to achieve the final outcome. The tutorial is in the form of a screencast to make it as easy as possible to follow. This is a great illustrator technique worth adding to your design arsenal.

Cartoon characters and illustrations have a great ability to make peaople laugh and feel good. Cartoon characters are also used by different companies to create their brand mascot, as they seem to stay in their client’s minds and attract attention. If you are an aspiring illustrator or you just want to improve your Adobe Illustrator skills, then these amazing cartoon tutorials will surely be of help.

If you have some basic sketching skills and talent, these tutorials will seem pretty easy to you. Illustrator is not an easy drawing tool to use, but with a little exercise and determination, you can become a great, talented illustrator.

With Halloween fast approaching it’s time take our design work to a dark, spooky place.

That’s the whole beauty of design isn’t it? The ability to adapt our style of design based on the creative brief, the context or the client.

Today we’re going to create a seriously creepy human puppet hybrid using a regular portrait photo of a beautiful model. This is a tutorial packed full of useful techniques, and it’s also an outcome that you could recreate with your own portraits and really scare your friends (creepy profile picture anyone?).

You’ll master a range of techniques including:

Digital Painting.

Retro color correction.

Creating a living puppet.

Working with adjustment layer’s, combined vector masks and color correction.

Using Filters to create a dramatic, well focused scene.

What You’ll Be Creating:

Here’s a look at the outcome you’ll be able to produce by the end of this lesson:

You’ve probably heard of Ghost, a new blogging platform with a difference. It gained a lot of interest after appearing on Kickstarter in April, and has just been released. Read on to learn more about Ghost, and where to find resources for it on the Envato Marketplaces.

What Is Ghost?

What is Ghost? You’ll find a clear answer when visiting the official website: “Just a blogging platform.”

John O’Nolan, the founder of Ghost, went into detail about the platform on Webdesigntuts+ yesterday. In that article, he describes what makes Ghost different to it’s competition:

Most web designers and web developers started by teaching themselves techniques and methods, found on the web. Very few of them actually followed some courses or went to design schools. The best way of learning web design and web development is to learn by yourself, that’s where passion and commitement show up. Self-taught designers and developers have learned a lot from websites which provide well structured information, tutorials and useful articles.

Today, we selected 20 of the best websites for improving your web design and development skills. Don’t forget to let us know if you know more such websites, and leave us a comment!

Our newest site Design Cuts, offers creatives the best deals on products they’ll actually put to use. To give you some fresh ideas, we accompany each deal with expert design tutorials.

Today, you’ll learn how to convert your regular photos into an authentic vintage looking outcome. This tutorial uses a range of great techniques that you can put to work on any of your photos. You’ll work with texturing, brush application, filters, color correction and more.

The tutorial is accompanied by a freebie pack, containing a high-res ink brush set, as well as the source file for this tutorial, so you can easily follow along.

Watercolor PSD brush sets can be used to create various types of designs, from unique digital paintings to logos, posters and even websites! These brushes can also be used to create awesome backgrounds and give a crafty touch to your design. If you want to create a grungy website with a crafty feel, these brushes may be the perfect choice for you.

We’ve looked around and found some of the best free high quality watercolor brushes, for you to download, add to your collection and start making beautiful designs. Which ones do you like best?

jQuery helps you provide high quality, dynamic and attractive input forms for your website’s visitors. In this post, you’ll find some of the best jQuery plugins which will help you a lot in creating better HTML forms. These plugins will help you visually enhance your HTML forms, manipulate data and validation, create calendars and date pickers and more!

Let us know, which ones of these 20 Best jQuery Plugins for Better HTML forms will you choose?

These 20 inspiring Photoshop poster tutorials in this post will teach you the basics of Photoshop, and also some advanced manipulations techniques for creating amazing designs. These tutorial are ideal for print designers or any other designers who want to improve their Photoshop skills.

Learning Photoshop’s 3D capabilities can be a daunting process. However, you could say the same for the first time you learned masking, or the adjustments panel.

Mastering 3D work can add a whole new depth (excuse the pun!) to your design work. Particularly 3D typography can be an awesome final touch for anything from web design to print design or photo manipulation work.

Basically, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and tackle a new skill!

Today’s tutorial will show you around the 3D capabilities of Photoshop CS6 Extended.

As always, this won’t be a dreary old taking you through the motions tutorial. In fact, we’re getting our drank on and taking you into the depths of the nightclub scene. You’ll be creating a cool neon sign and learning a very cool text effect along the way.

What You’ll Be Creating:

Here’s a look at the outcome you’ll be able to produce by the end of this lesson: